Moving poem, Nick. It's hard to talk about the Holocaust, to talk about Auschwitz - it's difficult and painful. Using the shoes as the core image and metaphor allows us a way to begin in this study of the horror of it all.The shoes are ordrinary and extraordinary - both terrifying evidence of what happened, exmaples of the difference people (showing people as individuals), and yet they are also everyday and familiar, which is all the more frightening, as we have these shoes - they can be any of us.

..Oxfords, Brogues and T-strap.

The shoes as an image can therefore stand in for the people killed there - both (before) living and after they were murdered, thus reminding us not just of the dead, but of their life before.

As the poem progresses, the poem touches on 'the uncanny' - it's there in the pile of shoes - just shoes en masse without feet, legs, people. These ordinary items that we might see anywhere, are now transformed into 'tone' deaf' 'victims' and who loiter waiting for the:

walk home
in darkness.

In this room is a long black drop.
At its edge the fleshless stand over us
as we gawp clear eyed behind glass,
and pass along the window,
humbled

The only question I had in my mind was whether 'draggled carcases' at the end of the first stanza was necessary? I only say this because once I knew where the poem was set, then read the lines about the shoes I was already thinking of the shoes as representing the dead.